Brother MFC-J5920DW Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

Sometimes, buying in bulk isn't better.

A couple of months ago, while reviewing the Brother MFC-J985DW XL Work Smart All-in-One, we noted that in some scenarios, non-"XL" versions of the company’s INKvestment-ready printers were better values. INKvestment is Brother’s relatively new ink-related initiative designed to (1) compete with HP’s ink-by-mail Instant Ink service and Epson’s bulk-supply EcoTank ink-delivery program, and (2) in theory, save you money on ink. INKvestment centers around very-high-yield ink cartridges that deliver a low cost per page. They're still cartridges, though, unlike EcoTank, which uses ink in filler bottles or even bags. It's all about the per-page cost.

The difference between the non-XL and XL Brother models is quite simple. The XL units come with three sets of high-yield ink tanks, while the non-XL models, like today’s review unit, Brother’s MFC-J5920DW, come with only one set.

This model, as well as the XL model mentioned above that we reviewed, list for a $299.99 MSRP, despite all the extra ink in the box with the MFC-J985DW XL. These are very different printers, though.

Today’s review unit is a high-volume model designed to churn out hundreds, even thousands, of pages each month, while the MFC-J985DW XL is not meant to print and copy nearly as much. The MFC-J5920DW has a 30,000-page monthly duty cycle (the number of pages the manufacturer says you should limit printing to each month to avoid premature wear), versus the MFC-J985DW XL, which has only a 2,500-page rating.

As we'll discuss later, the INKvestment ink tanks give the MFC-J5920DW an exceptionally low cost per page (CPP) for both monochrome and color pages. That brings it a long way toward meeting our primary criteria for a midrange to high-volume printer: relatively fast print speeds, high print quality, and a competitive CPP. As you’ll see as you read on, the MFC-J5920DW hits those other two high spots, too. (It prints great-looking business documents, and it's fast enough.) Plus, one thing that sets Brother’s business printers apart is that many can print to paper up to ledger-size (11x17 inches). The MFC-J5920DW is one of these.

Versus competing models in its price range from Epson and HP, this AIO has a host of worthy features. For instance, it’s the only wide-format-capable inkjet we know of with this low of an operational cost, and it supports most of the latest mobile and cloud connectivity options. Our bottom line here: If you need to print or copy 10,000 to 20,000 pages each month on the cheap, as both mass-monochrome documents and color ones, the MFC-J5920DW is a good, cost-efficient solution.

Design & Features

At 23.3 inches across, 16.6 inches from front to back, and 15.9 inches high, and weighing a sturdy 37.7 pounds, the MFC-J5920DW isn’t overly large for a high-volume AIO, especially one capable of printing to ledger-size stock. One reason for the trim footprint? Brother designed this and most of its other Business Smart models so that paper loads into the trays (and runs through the printer itself) in landscape mode. While you still probably wouldn’t want it parked on your desktop (especially in the busy workgroup scenario that this printer was designed for), it should be easy enough to find a place for, seeing as it supports Wi-Fi (wireless), Ethernet (wired), and connecting to a single PC via USB. You just need to make the space for it somewhere central.

Prime among the MFC-J5920DW's feature set is its single-pass, dual-sensor scanner, which is supplemented by a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). With the ADF's help, you can scan, copy, or fax up to 50 single- or double-sided sheets fed straight through the scanning mechanism. It's duplex scanning without the page-flipping. As you can imagine, scanning both sides of an original simultaneously is faster than having the machine scan one side, draw the page back in to the ADF, flip it, and then scan it again. This is a big deal if you often need to do bulk scan jobs.

Beyond the connectivity options we mentioned, the MFC-J5920DW supports most key mobile and cloud connection options, including Wi-Fi Direct, for connecting compatible mobile devices without the aid of a network or router. Also available are Brother’s own iPrint&Scan apps for Android and iOS. These enable you to print and manage the machine from a smartphone or tablet, as well as connect to cloud services. Among the supported cloud items are Google Cloud Print, Evernote, and OneDrive.

In addition to scanning to and printing from cloud sites, you can also do so from network drives, USB thumb drives, and PictBridge-compatible devices such as digital cameras. The USB/PictBridge port is located under a small cover to the left of the control panel. You handle most of these functions, and other walk-up/PC-free operations (such as making copies or scanning to the cloud), from a 3.7-inch color touch screen, shown below…

You can also do much of the necessary configuring of the MFC-J5920DW from this panel.

Not supported, though, is Near-Field Communication (NFC) for making peer-to-peer, touch-to-print connections with this printer. Also, as a business printer, it lacks certain security features that some competitors give you. It does support all the necessary wireless-security protocols, including SSID and WEP 64/128, as well as the ability to lock out specific primary functions (i.e., print, scan, copy, and fax), making them available to specific users only. You don't get a "secure print" function, however, for assigning PINs to print jobs (which you'd then release at the panel by entering the number), nor can you assign IDs for monitoring print traffic. But you can use the printer's Secure Function Lock to assign passwords to specific users. It's also possible to assign each user a page limit. So you'll want to be sure the monitoring and limitation functions match what, if anything, you need to do in your workgroup. Single-person home offices will be a lot less concerned with much of this.

Finally, like most Brother business printers, this one comes with a strong software bundle. It includes Scansoft’s PaperPort SE with OCR for Windows, as well as Presto PageManager for Mac. Between them, you have most everything you need for scanning, converting scanned text to editable text, and managing your scanned documents. (We'll get into how well they worked in a bit.) Overall, the MFC-J5920DW's feature set is a good fit for a midrange-to-high-volume printer deployed for a workgroup, or for a heavy-printing small or home office.

Setup

Brother AIOs, like most others, are very easy to set up and get going. Removing the tape and other packing materials took only a few minutes, as did loading our initial stack of paper and the bundled ink tanks. The printer found our wireless network right away, and with the help of the unit’s Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), it logged on to the network with the touch of two buttons, one on the printer itself and one on the router. (WPS setup is easy, provided your router supports it; chances are, if you bought it within the past five years or so, it does.)

The installation-disc routine found the MFC-J5920DW in no time, and installed the drivers and utilities. Within a few minutes, we were up and printing. Overall, the installation process worked flawlessly, and our only complaint is that given that optical discs are being phased out gradually, especially on laptops, a driver disc is a bit of a throwback. To allow a wider range of devices to connect, without forcing users to hunt down the software online, we’d prefer drivers and utilities on a USB thumb drive. Brother certainly isn't the only printer maker that needs to make this switch, though.

Cost Per Page

One thing is certain: The MFC-J5920DW has a very appealing cost per page when used with Brother's genuine ink.

As mentioned earlier, the MFC-J5920DW ships with the company’s XXL ink tanks, in this case the Brother LC20E cartridges. The black cartridge sells for $23.99 on Brother’s site, and it’s good for about 2,400 prints, while the three color tanks (cyan, magenta, yellow) sell for $14.99 each and deliver about 1,200 pages in concert with the black. Using these numbers, we calculated the cost per page at just under a cent (a tiny fraction under) for black-and-white pages and 4.7 cents for color.

These are excellent numbers. We know of just a handful of business inkjets with CPPs this low, among them HP’s PageWide Pro models, but the lowest-cost AIO in that line is $200 more than our Brother review unit. A few of Epson’s EcoTank models, notably the WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank All-in-One Printer and the WorkForce Pro WF-R4640 All-in-One Printer, also have comparable CPPs. In fact, the latter Epson model delivers 0.9 cent (that's nine-tenths of a cent) for black-and-white pages and 2.4 cents for color. But that printer itself sells for $1,200, so it's in another league.

If your office printing scenario calls for thousands of documents each month, the MFC-J5920DW can get you there much more economically than most other printers in this price range.

Paper Handling

The MFC-J5920DW’s input capacity is 580 sheets, pulled from three sources: two 250-sheet drawers, and an 80-sheet multipurpose tray for bypassing the two main drawers. All three are shown in the images below. You can use the multipurpose tray for printing off-size sheets, or different types of media, without having to remove a main drawer and reconfigure it, thus taking the printer out of service.

All three input sources support tabloid-size sheets, but the scanner and ADF support only 8.5x11-inch (letter-size) documents.

Printed pages land on a 50-sheet output tray whose small size, frankly, doesn’t make a lot of sense in a printer with this kind of paper capacity and a 30,000-page duty cycle. Bigger print jobs will need some babysitting.

In the course of our tests, the paper path and the ADF (whether doing simplex or duplex work) both worked without incident; no paper jams or any other mishaps.